Monday, October 26, 2009

Capitol Hill

It’s been a bit since I’ve written on here… As I type, my roommate is playing Ocarina of Time, a fine game indeed.

The College of Engineering took me to Washington DC a couple weeks ago, where I had the privilege of representing UNT, as well as a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Center called the Convergence Technology Center. It’s always a mouthful to say, but that is indeed what I spent my week doing. I did miss all my classes for a few days, which never does my GPA any favors… I try not to skip too often though.

How was my trip to Washington? I had a feeling you'd ask me that






As a student, they gave me a comfy hotel room, a tour of the city, and even a shiny award. I got an award which read "Advanced Technological Education Student Award for Excellence". The NSF is crazy about long names for things. To get this award you have to achieve an outstanding GPA, attend an NSF ATE center, and effectively demonstrate knowledge in your related ATE field. My field in particular is called Convergence Technology, which involves a lot of computer networking, voice over IP, green IT practices, project management, etc. I'm definitely please to have had this opportunity.

One of the more interesting things though was to listen to the key note speaker talk about the challenge of the 21st century: the energy crisis. Perhaps not a crisis, but it will indeed be the defining challenge of our generation. If only we had some *coughcoughengineerscoughcough that could fix this for us… Really, when you look at the world's problems, there's always a solution, and the solution is always thought up my some random smart dude. Need to instantly talk to people across the planet? Need light in dark places? Need to be able to spy on the sneaky red army trying to beat us into space or aim nukes at us during a period of tension and threat of nuclear holocaust, but can't send spy planes in to take pictures because it's costing too much money and man power and could easily spark a war? Send up a sattelite.

OK so that last example was a bit reminiscent of my time at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. If that's not full of Engineering, I don't know what is...


Also this picture is pretty humorous:

It says:
Windows - "Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low"

Your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file. During this process, memory requests for some applications may be denied. For more information, see Help.

So FYI, the Smithsonian runs Windows, and it seems they run very old Windows boxes... ;)



lol